Check Mine Out Blog

Anybody else noticed this new analogue style of photography spread across the music and media world? Think Noah and the Whales new album cover last night on earth and the stonking new video by Foo Fighters.

Images that look like they where made in the 90’s are absolutely everywhere. You know everybody was singing Spaceman I always wanted you to go into Space man (tune!) and girl power was spreading across the world.  Ah nostalgic bliss…

Back then; in the days before digital, photographers used a chemical process called ‘cross-processing’ which allows you to alter the colour to produce interesting and kind of sci-fi effects. There are some cool aps around that can give a quick retro image such as instagr.am and hipstamaticapp, which are actually great, but I want to give you the low-down of how to do this yourself from start to finish, so you can make your own slick album cover/t-shirt design. It’s inspired by the same original process, but using good ole photohop! (No need for safety lights, wet paper on pegs – just instant gratification!)

This is the image I’m going to show you to make (This is wicked rock band Monsters in the Attic BTW –  who combine classic sounds from the past with energy of today)

I use Photoshop CS5 and I would probably class this as an intermediate kind of thing. Processes we are going to use are: Curves, colour balance, exposure, Gradient fill layers and layer styles.

Ok Step 1:

Find your self a flippin’ great image to sit in the background. Try to stick with some thing that is overall quite light as what we are going to do to works best on light images.

Bring the image into photoshop, make sure your layer is selected and go to images > Adjustments > Curves

Step 2: You should then get a new window that looks like this. In the drop down you need to select > Cross Process

Step 3: The chart should now show a Red, Green, Blue and Black line. You can create a point on the black and shift it between the 3 coloured lines. To create this kind of colour I created 2 points and place them mostly in the green/blue areas – as shown.

Have a play with this you can get some great effects. This is what would have been done with smelly chemicals, over days and days by uber professionals. Now we – the intermediate-geeks, can do it with nothing else then a computer and Mr photoshop. Ah Adobe – you bring light to my world.

Step 4: So another photographic element we can control on photoshop is ‘exposure’. Back in the day it was easy to accidently get an over exposed photo – all those F stops and light readings. So complicated….

P’shop makes it easy again. You can find Exposure settings in Image > Adjustments > Exposure.

Step 5: Photos back in the 90’s had this washed out feel. Adjust the toggles to lighten the image and bring out the white.

Step 6: Ok, now we’ve got our background image we need to place in a larger frame and create room for an overlaying image and text. I normally just open up a new file, drag and drop the image inside (with both layers selected) and then adjust the size of frame by using the crop tool. I also added in a guide for a border (just click and drag from the rules top and left). Big white borders are defo in!

If you want to make this a t-shirt design, there is a download template available here – which will give you the perfect size image for a full t-shirt print http://www.checkmineout.co.uk/downloads/templates/CheckMineOutPSTemplate.psd

n.b the template is 2160 x 2700px and 180dpi. – But remember if you want to make an actual printed CD cover – heaven forbid us to be exceedingly retro! You need to also keep a copy of you image at 300 dpi.

! Beware if your using images from the net (watch out for copyright issues!) screen images are 72 dpi – not good for print. If thay are very large in dimensions you can increase the dpi and shrink the dimensions by using image > adjustments > image size. !

Step 7: Right now find an amazing closer shot that would work as an overlay. This one of Patch rocking out is marvelous!

Bring it in and place on top of your other image.

! Remember to colour match all you images. You need to repeat steps 1 – 5 to create colour feel on this image !

Step 8: New we need to blend in Patch with the background image we already have place in. Just change the layer style to ‘Screen’

Step 8: As you can see we’ve pretty much lost Patch. We need to create a background gradient fill layer. This will help Patch blend properly with the background image we’ve already placed in. Make sure this layer is beneath you ‘Patch Layer”  Go to:

Layer > New fill layer > Gradient

Step11: Adjust the height of the gradient to cover what needs to be covered. You can also change the colour of the fill by double clicking on the coloured squares on the toggle arrows. I made the fill go up to the bottom of our background image.

Step 12: Now we need to make sure we’ve still got our nice white border and room for some text beneath. Now just draw a box use the Rectangular Marquee Tool the go to Select > Inverse and hit delete.

Step 13:

To make this image even better we need to blend a little white into it by create another Gradient fill layer, but this time it is white and you need to adjust the direction by toggling the directional wheel

Step 14:

Step 6: BLUE! Blue, blue, blue. Blue is everywhere at the moment. All these 90’s style photos have a blue tinge to them.  Select the area inside the white border, fill it with a nice pungent blue, reduce the opacity and fill (mines around 40 and 60 – but depends on your image) and change the layer style to Color Burn.

Step 15: To make it really look like an analogue photo, lets put a little light lens flare in there. I’m using an image of lights that I found on a free stock photo website, that is also royalty free such as www.freephotosbank.com

Bring the lights photo into you image and change the layer style to Screen

Step 16: Now we just need add some text in a cool 90’s font and we’re ready to print on a t-shirt, send on a press release, CD or any promo material.

Heres my T-shirt. I’m wearing it at the weekend. You can buy it here in the Monsters t-shirt merch store and make your own retro photo t-shirt here

Aweseome!